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Woodworking

A hobby is a valuable outlet for those days when things get tough, as well as a nice way to recharge your mental "batteries" and come back to work re-energized. My hobby is making things with my hands, mostly woodworking nowadays. Here is a small gallery of projects.

Wannigan

A wannigan is a wooden box designed to fit inside a canoe. This was one of my first real woodworking projects. I made it out of red cedar with oak steam-bent rails.

Cradle

This was a largely unsuccessful project. The angles were a pain to get right and the size was altogether too large. Babies slept in it at most a couple of times. The material was cherry.

Stitch and glue sailboat/rowboat

My gift for getting tenure was to build a boat - something I had wanted to do for a long time. This is a skerry (inspired by old Norse boats) built from a kit from Chesapeake Light Craft in Annapolis. Don't let the word "kit" fool you. It took over 200 hours of work over about 3 months to get it done to a "union best effort" level of quality. It does float and sails quite well.

Space organizer...

When you get a new house you need a place to stash things as you walk in the door.

Cello stand

And a place to store a cello. Material is cherry, and the base adjusts to accommodate all size cellos.

More boats

The most recent boat building adventure involves skin on frame kayaks. The frame is built out of baltic birch plywood and red cedar tied together with artificial sinew, then the boat is covered with polyester fabric and made waterproof with good old porch paint.

Pen pineapple apple pen

If this doesn't make sense, just google it. ... my apologies. Made out of poplar and finished with CA glue.

Murphy bed

A nice solution to the frequently unused guest room. Now the space can be used more efficiently when visitors are not around. Bought the hardware kit online, and built the frame from plywood. A (somewhat) fun project if you have a couple days to spare.

Door handles

A cabinet at my tae kwon do studio had lost its handles so I made a couple, re-purposing a pair of chopsticks and scraps of cherry.

Fid and seam rubber

If you want to sew your own sails you need the right equipment, though it's becoming harder and harder to buy equipment for those who want to use the traditional methods. So there I found myself needing to make a fid (a spikey stick used to enlarge holes and separate rope strands) and a seam rubber (a flat piece of wood with a handle used to rub down fabric seams so they stay flat while being sewn). Both were made on the lathe, the fid from a piece of maple from my firewood pile, and the seam rubber from a piece of cherry.

Kitchen table

This is my first commission! Friends have asked me to build them a long and narrow table for an awkward space in their kitchen. After a trip to Frederick to explore wood choices we settled on cherry with a 3/4" plywood table top with a figured cherry edge banding. In retrospect, the top is a bit thin and too flexible and may need reinforcement if the "customers" so request. The edge banding is mitered and also beveled so that the table appears to be much thinner than it actually is.

The legs are attached to the top with 3/4" bolts. I used T-nuts secured within two wood strips glued to the table top instead of trying to carefully drill the nuts into the plywood itself.

The wedges holding the stretcher together are hand-carved with the initials of my friends.

In building the table I had the foresight to put two coats of finish on the leg pieces before gluing the mortise and tenon joints together. Doing so allowed me to easily handle the glue squeeze-out with a damp cloth and avoid the invariably painful sanding.